WI: The Murdoch Family were Democrats / Fox were a left wing media outlet

In OTL, prior to relocating to the United States of America, the Rupert Murdoch was a member of the Australian Labour Party and helped Labour win on a platform of universal healthcare. After moving to the United States, he became a Republican and established Fox News and the rest is history.

But, what if Murdoch had stuck with Labour sensibilities and become a Democrat in the United States? This might have required a different Democrat in office than Jimmy Carter... Maybe Scoop Jackson could have won him over.

But I digress, what would the impact have been if the Murdoch Family were Democrats instead of Republicans? Would Fox News be a left-wing news source that makes MSNBC look like CNN? What would become of CNN and MSNBC, assuming those still exist? What would fill the Right-Wing news gap? What would the impact be of a heavily left wing news outlet popping up and following the same process of growth and expansion that the OTL Fox News did?

Who would be personalities that Murdoch's empire used for a left wing Fox News?
 
I think the success of Fox News as a right-wing outlet has more to do with political/media demographics than it does the whims of the founder.

Your question might be a little like asking "What if George Carlin had decided to do conservative comedy, defending the Catholic Church and attacking people who use foul language"? Answer: The typical people who frequent stand-up comedy clubs would have booed him off the stage.
 
I think the success of Fox News as a right-wing outlet has more to do with political/media demographics than it does the whims of the founder.

Your question might be a little like asking "What if George Carlin had decided to do conservative comedy, making fun of atheists and attacking people who use foul language"? Answer: The typical people who frequent stand-up comedy clubs would have booed him off the stage.

But originally Fox News picked and chose cheaper locations to get established. So one town would have access to the channel while another similar town would not. They did studies that showed that Fox News moving into locations made them more conservative and more likely to vote Republican than beforehand. In effect, Fox created their own demographic.
 
I think the success of Fox News as a right-wing outlet has more to do with political/media demographics than it does the whims of the founder.

Your question might be a little like asking "What if George Carlin had decided to do conservative comedy, defending the Catholic Church and attacking people who use foul language"? Answer: The typical people who frequent stand-up comedy clubs would have booed him off the stage.
Man makes his own destiny but not under the conditions of his choosing.
 
Fox News would be nowhere near as successful as it is today if it had never established a virtual stranglehold on conservative viewers.
 
Fox News would be nowhere near as successful as it is today if it had never established a virtual stranglehold on conservative viewers.

But the thing is, when Fox News started the rural areas still have prairie populists or whatever you want to call them. Wouldn’t a liberal Fox News keep these people on the democratic spectrum? Or is their rightward shift inevitable
 
But the thing is, when Fox News started the rural areas still have prairie populists or whatever you want to call them. Wouldn’t a liberal Fox News keep these people on the democratic spectrum? Or is their rightward shift inevitable

Maybe, but in that case, there's just simply less reason for Murdoch to start Fox News. Removing his own ideological inclinations for a minute, what would be the hook that would make the network stand out from CNN, NBC News, ABC News and all the rest?
 
Maybe, but in that case, there's just simply less reason for Murdoch to start Fox News. Removing his own ideological inclinations for a minute, what would be the hook that would make the network stand out from CNN, NBC News, ABC News and all the rest?

Bombastic liberal personalities maybe?
 
In OTL, prior to relocating to the United States of America, the Rupert Murdoch was a member of the Australian Labour Party and helped Labour win on a platform of universal healthcare. After moving to the United States, he became a Republican and established Fox News and the rest is history.

But, what if Murdoch had stuck with Labour sensibilities and become a Democrat in the United States? This might have required a different Democrat in office than Jimmy Carter... Maybe Scoop Jackson could have won him over.

But I digress, what would the impact have been if the Murdoch Family were Democrats instead of Republicans? Would Fox News be a left-wing news source that makes MSNBC look like CNN? What would become of CNN and MSNBC, assuming those still exist? What would fill the Right-Wing news gap? What would the impact be of a heavily left wing news outlet popping up and following the same process of growth and expansion that the OTL Fox News did?

Who would be personalities that Murdoch's empire used for a left wing Fox News?

Murdoch had already moved to the right in Australian politics before becoming a media presence in the US. Having been a big Whitlam supporter in 1972, he rapidly turned against him. And even before the break with Whitlam, Murdoch's political record was hardly consistently pro-Labor, as I noted in a post here a while back:

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Murdoch's political record before the mid-1970's was mixed. "The Murdoch press supported Labor in 1963, at the same time supporting the Country party element of the coalition government and strongly opposing the Liberal party majority. This difficult piece of political legerdemain — supporting an opposition and part of a government against the rest of the government — was not repeated. In the two subsequent elections Murdoch supported the coalition.

"The solid [newspaper] front against Labor began to wilt after the 1969 elections which Labor came within an ace of winning. The coalition government, which had held office since 1949, was running out of steam. The Liberal prime ministers who succeeded the legendary Sir Robert Menzies had lacked distinction. Labor under Whitlam had emerged, relatively united, with a new set of coherent and attractive policies. Plainly the era of Liberal-Country party domination was running out.

"These factors drew Murdoch to the Labor camp. In addition, the Australian, which Murdoch had launched as a national newspaper in 1964, had won considerable support as a progressive newspaper tinged with radicalism. Murdoch had also purchased two Sydney newspapers from Sir Frank Packer. This was a double bonus for Labor: it removed the harmful impact of the Packer press, which had been remorseless in its opposition to Labor, and it brought Murdoch and it brought Murdoch to the support of Labor with a string of daily newspapers. Murdoch also made a substantial contribution to the Labor party's campaign funds. Supported by the influential Melbourne paper, the Age, Labor entered the 1972 election campaign with a considerable volume of media backing, and this it had lacked in all precious elections..." C. J. Lloyd, "The Media and the Elections" in Howard R. Penniman (ed), Australia at the Polls: The National Elections of 1975, p. 179.

The question is what caused the rift and growing animosity between Murdoch and Whitlam and whether it could have been avoided. According to Lloyd (p. 180) "Whitlam publicly attributed it to his government's refusal to approve a major mining venture in which Murdoch had an interest." (Murdoch of course denied that, saying he had only had a "minute" share in the consortium.) Also, it was widely reported that Murdoch had sought the post of Australia's High Commissioner to London from the Whitlam government...

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/ahc-new-york-post-stays-liberal.440601/#post-16849224
 
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Anyway, this FiveThirtyEight article is worth quoting...

Fox News founder Roger Ailes, who died Thursday at the age of 77, was one of the most (if not the most) controversial and influential news executives in American history. Ailes changed the way people watch news in this country, polarizing the market.

Before Ailes helped launch Fox News in October 1996, television news was not outwardly ideological. There were the network news channels (ABC, CBS and NBC) and one major cable news channel (CNN). None of those made explicit partisan appeal a priority. Sure, there were opinion programs (“Crossfire,” “The McLaughlin Group,” etc.). But they were usually small parts of a larger, non-ideological programming lineup, and even those shows tended to feature a mix of viewpoints.

The lack of a liberal or a conservative channel helps explain why Democratic and Republican voters really didn’t have a favorite network back in 1996. The Washington Post asked television news viewers what their main source for campaign news was in November 1996, just as President Bill Clinton was winning re-election by besting GOP candidate Bob Dole. And every network’s audience mirrored the nation fairly accurately: Each had a few more Clinton than Dole supporters just as the country had more Clinton than Dole voters.

Ailes saw an opening. Republicans had long believed that television news was biased against them. Fox News was billed as a corrective, launching with the slogan “fair and balanced” — a signal to conservative viewers that the network would be “fair” to Republicans, unlike other news outlets. He stocked Fox’s prime-time lineup with right-leaning commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

On election night in 2004, Fox News’s audience was bigger than any other cable network’s, and its 8 million viewers were more than triple its election night audience from 2000. It was clear that Ailes’s message was working. Republicans were tuning in to Fox News in massive numbers. According to post-election Pew Research Center surveys that asked voters what television network they got their campaign news from in 2004, 2008 and 2012, Fox News became the home for a plurality and eventually a majority of Republicans. After the 2016 campaign, a majority of Donald Trump voters told Suffolk University that the TV news network they trusted the most was Fox.

More at the link, but you get the picture.

A world without Fox News, or with a radically different Fox News, would indeed be different, but I'm unconvinced that someone else wouldn't try substantively the same thing, given the state of the media at the time.
 
But the thing is, when Fox News started the rural areas still have prairie populists or whatever you want to call them. Wouldn’t a liberal Fox News keep these people on the democratic spectrum? Or is their rightward shift inevitable

Granted, I haven't seen the statistics or studies that you mention, but I think it's correct to say that a rightward drift was inevitable. In Canada, farmers in Saskatchean went from being generally left-wing, or at least economically interventionist, in the mid-20th Century, to being pretty consistently right-wing nowadays. This was without any sort of Fox-style news outlet emerging on the scene. (Well, there's the National Post, started by Conrad Black in the late 90s, but it's a money-loser, and I don't think is really aimed at a rural crowd anyway.)
 
The thing is, I think liberals were probably largely less dissatisfied with the news media status quo in the late 1990s/early 2000s than conservatives were, so that's a somewhat harder sell.

I think the closest equivalent to the Fox News shock-jocks would be the liberal late-night talk show hosts(ie. Jon Stewart and his heirs). Some of you may recall Fox's Half Hour News Hour, which tried to do the same thing in the same medium, only from a conservative viewpoint, and failed miserably. I think that gets back to my earlier point about different formats attracting different political demographics.
 
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